Table Of ContentFor Archer and Elisabeth
Text copyright © 2010 by Chad Robertson.
Photographs copyright © 2010 by Eric Wolfinger and Chad Robertson.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written
permission from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4521-0028-9
The Library of Congress has previously cataloged this title under ISBN 978-0-8118-7041-2
Designed by VANESSA DINA.
Food and prop styling by ERIC WOLFINGER and CHAD ROBERTSON.
Typesetting by JANIS REED.
Photograph on page 29 by Catherine Karnow.
Front cover image and photographs on pages 19, 34, 35, 78, 115, 136, 138, 150, 178, 210, 216, 222, 224,
236, 239, and 252 by Chad Robertson.
Photographs on pages 18 and 42 by Suzanne Yacovetti.
Illustrations by David Wilson.
Page 9: Les Canotiers de la Meurthe, Émile Friant, 1888. Courtesy of Le Musée de l’École de Nancy.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Bread in Time
CHAPTER 1
Basic Country Bread
CHAPTER 2
Semolina and Whole-Wheat Breads
CHAPTER 3
Baguettes and Enriched Breads
CHAPTER 4
Days-Old Bread
Acknowledgments
Index
Table of Equivalents
About the Authors
Bread in Time
My strongest inspiration came not from real bread but from images—images of a
time and place when bread was the foundation of a meal and at the center of
daily life. There is a painting of boaters gathered at a riverside table. At the head,
a large crusty loaf held close to the heart is cut into wedges to commence the
meal. This scene was painted a little more than a century ago in France, when a
worker’s portion of bread was two pounds per day, and bread was on every table
at mealtime. This was elemental bread that sustained generations. To find this
bread, I would have to learn make it. Thus began my search for a certain loaf
with an old soul.
I opened my first bakery nearly fifteen years ago after three years of
formal apprenticeship and with the vision of my ideal loaf taking shape. Each
loaf would tell the hands of the baker who made it, and each would also have its
own expression—like a clay vessel pulled from the kiln after firing. The loaf
would be baked dark, and the substantial, blistered crust would hold some give
while containing a voluptuous, wildly open crumb with the sweet character of
natural fermentation and a subtle balanced acidity. The bread would be a joy to
eat fresh and would keep well for a week.
Although I had apprenticed with some of the finest artisan bakers in the
United States and France, none had taught me how to make the loaf I was
envisioning. Instead, they gave me the tools to get there.
From my first mentor, I learned to approach bread making as both a craft
and a philosophy of ingredients and how they interact. With that understanding
came the promise that I could find my way to any bread I imagined. “Dough is
dough,” he liked to say, implying that all breads are closely related—even the
ones that seemed quite different.
After years of learning, I realized I would never get there working under
the tutelage of someone else. I was twenty-three when Elisabeth, now my wife,
and I built our first small bakeshop with the help of friends north of San
Francisco, along the coast of Tomales Bay. Bakeshop was an apt name for the
room where I would spend the next six years working. We cut a hole in the wall
and built a wood-fired oven outside facing into the shop. The shop was one step
from the home where we lived. Technically, I was a home baker with a big oven.
I would have to make hundreds of loaves a day for years in a sort of solitary
baking trance to achieve what I had in my mind’s eye.
I started with the wood-fired oven and no mixer. The rigor of mixing three
hundred pounds of dough by hand required a softer dough, so I added more
water.
During my first apprenticeship, I had worked with wet doughs, so this was
familiar territory. The oven was fired all day as the dough was mixed, shaped,
and set to rise on cloths. The loaves were ready to bake a few hours after
shaping, and I baked through the night. But after months with little sleep, I
changed my course. Opening the windows in the evening cooled the dough
down and slowed the final rising significantly. The bake could wait until the next
morning.
I held close to my ideal, but after such a long rise, the resulting bread was
sometimes more sour than I wanted. To counter this, I began using my wild yeast
starter at a younger, more mild stage until I achieved the complex flavors I was
after with the right balance of acidity. Now, I could get a decent night’s rest,
freed from the “life of bats.” The only problem with this new schedule was that I
would have to bake later in the day and sell bread in the afternoon. So that’s
what I did: gaining the pleasures of warm bread for dinner and toast for
breakfast. After a decade of working alone, I took on my first apprentices. I had
spent almost half my life obsessing over bread; it was now something I did, not
something I talked about. Making bread had become a mostly silent meditation
for me, and I liked it that way. It would take a fortuitous trade agreement to draw
me out.
In 2005, Eric Wolfinger came to work at Tartine with no baking
experience. He was on track to becoming a chef before he decided to try his
hand at baking. Eric grew up surfing in Southern California and noticed that I
had an ideal surfing schedule: starting my day around noon and finishing in the
early evening. He suggested a trade. He offered to teach me to surf, and I would
teach him to make bread. Eric’s persistence wore me down, and I agreed to try
surfing.
By the time my sore ribs had healed from my first surfing session, I had a
new obsession, and he was the one to talk to. He followed my every surfing
question with another question about bread. During those long drives up and
down the coast, we often had two conversations going on at once. Months and
years passed as we learned together, surfing in the morning and baking in the
afternoon.
Lucky for me, Eric stuck around long enough to learn to make great bread,
gaining the keen understanding of my approach that would make our
collaboration on this book possible.
Over the course of time, I articulated what had been only in my head and
redefined for myself the craft of bread making. The idea was to distill the
content of our daily discussions into techniques that would work well for the
home baker—to make a baker’s guidebook.
Traditional, intuitive bread making does not lend itself naturally to a
written recipe. Before the study of microbiology, bakers understood the
subtleties of the process. The nature of fermentation was second nature to their
own. That is, they understood fermentation in relation to the rhythms of their
own lives. It is necessarily the same with modern artisan bakers. All points lead
back to the starter and the leaven as origin of the process, and the way that they
are used to manage fermentation determines the outcome. Then, as now, the
most important aspect of making bread was managing the stages of fermentation
by knowing what to look for. The visual element would be an integral part of this
book project. There was no question in my mind that Eric had to document our
work. He was uniquely qualified by his experience, his daily baking shift, and
his passion for photography. Tartine Bread would have to be photographed
throughout the process of building the book. This would require another year’s
commitment from Eric.
When I started describing how to make the basic loaf, I knew it would
take some work to translate my method into a process for making something
comparable at home. Eric had been baking on his days off at home for years,
using a cast-iron combo cooker as a baking vessel with excellent results. He
suggested we set up a private blog for a handful of bread testers, send them all
combo cookers, and engage in a virtual dialogue—sharing photos of home-
baked bread, answering questions, and adding to our instructions where they
needed more clarity.
Mostly, I expected it would be a helpful progress check, as we initially
intended to post every recipe for testing as we completed it. But within the first
week, we discovered two things: there were not enough hours in the day for us to
maintain an interactive blog, and many of our test bakers achieved, in their first
attempt, bread at home that looked as if it had come out of our own ovens on a
good day. We had expected neither of these things, but the latter was a
revelation. Indeed, the exemplary bread we show in the first chapter is a home-
baked tester loaf.
We stayed in contact with a few of the bread testers, who continued to
bake regularly. We answered questions as the testers came up with their own
schedules, modifying times and temperatures so that making bread fit into their
lives. Some made breads that were close to the original mold, while others made
different, equally delicious breads to suit their needs and their vision.
This was exactly what we had hoped for, and I decided to profile some of
our testers in this book. Relating our testers’ real-life experiences, I discuss how
they altered our approach to get distinctly different breads.
The “Tartine Bread” approach follows a loose set of concepts that we
introduce in a single “basic recipe” and then build on throughout the book. As
you gain an understanding of how bread “works,” you will be able to make
adjustments in timing and technique to achieve a broad range of results. The goal
of making bread with a satisfying depth of flavor, a good crust, and a moist,
supple crumb is a constant.
We begin by showing you how to make a leaven and then how to make
our Tartine Basic Country Bread at home. Since bread making has always been a
visual learning experience for me, I wanted a heavily photographic depiction of
the process to start. Jacques Pepin’s books La Technique and La Méthode were
strong inspirations. Learning a craft is as much about copying as it is about
